On the Trail: An Outdoor Book For Girls by Lena Beard and Adelia Belle Beard (1915), a book available on Gutenberg.org. Simultaneously charming and bewildering for today’s readers with its views on women and the outdoors, we loved spending time with this free download.

This 1915 treasure begins, "The joyous, exhilarating call of the wilderness and the forest camp is surely and steadily penetrating through the barriers of brick, stone, and concrete; through the more or less artificial life of town and city; and the American girl is listening eagerly."

The sisters, Mary Caroline "Lina" Beard (1852-1933) and Adelia Belle Beard (1857-1920) previously authored "The American Girls Handy Book" in the 1880s (various dates are credited) and were part of an esteemed outdoors family.

Their brother, Daniel Carter Beard (1850-1941) was an illustrator, author, youth leader, and social reformer who founded the Sons of Daniel Boone in 1905, which Beard later merged with the Boy Scouts of America.

The sisters were instrumental in the movement to develop a girl’s counterpart to the Scouts. Lina hosted an organizational meeting in 1912 for a “Girl Pioneers of America” organization, a precursor to the Camp Fire Girls.

For the first time, we’re asking readers to weigh in.
We’d like to hear your thoughts about:
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May, Riverhead Books, 2020, 256 pages
- OR -
Greenwood: A Novel, Michael Christie, Hogarth, 2021, 528 pages

We’re eager to hear your questions, thoughts, and insights. We want to share some of your impressions with our Nature Book Guide audience! Submit your audio files by Sunday, November 24 for consideration for the Winter issue. Some submissions may be shared on our blog and/or social media, even if you submit after November 24th. We’re excited to hear from you!

Meet the staff of the nonprofit URBAN RIVERS ( @urbanrivers ) in Chicago, who participated as guest panelists for our Autumn issue of Nature Book Guide! The issue celebrated volunteers, and as a nonprofit organization, Urban Rivers relies on engaged, good-hearted individuals to contribute to their work.

Their mission is to transform urban waterways into urban wildlife sanctuaries. They are bringing back habitat for native wildlife by building artificial floating gardens in historically industrialized sections of the Chicago River. These gardens are full of native wetland plants that grow hydroponically down through the garden modules into the water – providing high-quality, diverse habitat both above and below the water’s surface. The floating wetlands provide shelter and food for a diverse range of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. The root network of the plants, hanging below the gardens, provides critical habitat for fish as well as smaller members of the aquatic ecosystem, such as macroinvertebrates.

Nature Book Guide’s Founder and Editor, Beth Nobles, reads a passage from Maddalena Bearzi’s 2023 memoir, Stranded: Finding Nature in Uncertain Times from Heyday Books.

Stranded appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of the Nature Book Guide. “Her list of ‘Ideas for Uncertain Times’ is realistic, optimistic, hopeful, and reassuring. Bearzi hits the right tone for these chaotic times.”

Nature Book Guide’s Founder/Editor, Beth Nobles, interviews author Naila Moreira.

The Monarchs of Winghaven, Naila Moreira, Walker Books US,

2024, 320 pages. Reading Age: 8-12

Fifth-grader Sammie is new to town and having trouble making friends in her new school. “The Field” is her private, personal refuge where she likes to be alone to study the birds, insects, and flowers, recording everything in her journal. One day she encounters Bram, a boy with a camera, and Sammie is wary. Will he make fun of her and ruin everything?

We loved The Monarchs of Winghaven for its celebration of independent nature study and discovery, collaboration, citizen science, and stewardship of natural spaces.

Kevin Grange is an award-winning freelance writer with an emphasis on the medical field, adventure and travel. In addition to writing, Kevin works as a firefighter/paramedic with Jackson Hole Fire/EMS and Grand Teton National Park in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Nature Book Guide’s founder/editor, Beth Nobles, interviewed him for this issue about his book, Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey into the Secret Life of North America’s Most Fearsome Predator

Chris Ruggia is an artist and comic maker living in Alpine, Texas. His work explores the local desert landscape while encouraging people to look beyond their human-centered perspective with fun, empathy, and humor. He was recently an Artist-in-Residence in Big Bend National Park. He was interviewed this summer by Nature Book Guide’s Book Recommendation Panelist, Laura Mills.

We want to honor two people who’ve made a tremendous difference in our reading lives and who inspired the founding of our Nature Book Guide. Jeff Lee and Ann Marie Martin assembled and curated a collection of more than 50,000 books about natural history during their careers as booksellers with Denver’s Tattered Cover, and created the Rocky Mountain Land Library in 2006, a 501 c 3 organization. They put their hearts and souls into the organization by creating a special place for books and people to think, dream, explore, and wonder.

A post about the books on wildfire that have been recommended in the pages of the Nature Book Guide, including John Vaillant’s book, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World. Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, Victor Steffensen’s Fire Country, and Pam Houston’s Deep Creek, plus personal remembrances of living through the 2011 Rock House Fire in Far West Texas, along with photos of scorched land and a dust devil.

One of the Nature Book Guide’s goals is to make it easier for readers to find nature- and outdoor-oriented fiction, memoirs, and biographies. The founder/editor of Nature Book Guide shares her memory of discovering a nature novel in the stacks of her public library in the early 1970s, Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson.

A review of some of Nature Book Guide’s favorite field guides and nature identification guides, including National Geographic’s Field Guide to Birds of North America, The Cloud Collector’s Handbook (Gavin Preter-Pinney), and two from Firefly Books, Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises (Erich Hoyt) and the new Turtles of North America (Kyle Horner).

Nature Book Guide travels to places featured in books we love. We visited Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge and the Nature Conservancy’s Emiquon Preserve inspired by a passage in Rebecca Heisman’s book, Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration. Heisman visited Auriel Fournier, who oversees research at the Forbes Biological Station at the Preserve, to observe the banding of rails.

An interview in the Summer 2024 issue of the Nature Book Guide with author Ben Goldfarb on his book, Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of our Planet

An interview for the Summer 2024 issue of the Nature Book Guide, Suzanne Simpson, author of the book, Wild Houston. The interview was conducted by Book Recommendation Panelist for the Nature Book Guide, James P. Stancil, II.

Five books by our about pioneering environmentalist and writer, Rachel Carson, that are featured in the Spring 2024 issue of the Nature Book Guide—from The Sea Around Us to Silent Spring, biographical works (Linda Lear’s Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, and a graphic novel work on Carson’s life) to the impact Carson’s work has made in Rachel Carson and Her Sisters: Extraordinary Women Who Have Shaped America’s Environment.

Four nature novels we love and recommend for the young YA or middle school reader, ages 9-12, including HATCHET by Gary Paulsen, A BIRD WILL SOAR by Alison Green Myers, LEILA AND THE BLUE FOX by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston (Illustrator), and THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE by Jacqueline Kelly.

Highlights of our adventures and reading from the week: hiking in our local woods, encouraging readers to vote for their favorites from Best of the West Book Award shortlist (Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings, Camille Dungy’s Soil, and Shelley Read’s Go as a River), Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees, Sue Hubbel’s A Book of Bees, and wishing Camille Dungy a “Happy Paperback Publication Day” for Soil!

Image of a smiling girl, Joyce Orishaba, standing in front of a sunlit forest scene.

Highlights of our adventure and reading for the previous week, includes two books by Melissa Harrison, Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, and a work of fiction, All Among the Barley. We also visited Chicago’s Poetry Foundation and found one of the books we featured in our current issue of Nature Book Guide, Poetree by Shauna LeVoy Reynolds.

A smiling woman—Courtney Lyons-Garcia stands on a bridge. Four book covers, the books she recommended for the Nature Book Guide as one of their Book Recommendation Panel members is superimposed on the photo